It's been widely reported and that makes it fact-esque. - Stephen Colbert

Summary: Haiti was forced to pay France for its freedom. When they
couldn't afford the ransom, France (and other countries, including the
United States) helpfully offered high-interest loans. By 1900, 80% of
Haiti's annual budget went to paying off its "reparation" debt. They
didn't make the last payment until 1947. Just 10 years later, dictator
François Duvalier took over the country and promptly bankrupted it,
taking out more high-interest loans to pay for his corrupt lifestyle.
The Duvalier family, with the blind-eye financial assistance of Western countries, killed 10s of thousands of Haitians, until the Haitian people overthrew them in 1986. Today, Haiti is still paying off the debt of an oppressive dictator no one would help them get rid of for 30 years.

The rest of the world refuses to forgive this debt.

So, in a way, maybe Robertson is right. Haiti is caught in a deal with the devil, and the devil is us.

She also talks about the Jubilee Act, which would forgive Haitian debt without tying that forgiveness to the privatization of the entire country and what ever resources it has left. Feel free to call your member of Congress in support thereof.

In case you haven't read Shock Doctrine or read it a while ago and have forgotten how completely it explains the world, you can read about how the US withheld water from dying Haitians in order to get politicals goals met. Glossy but still damning NYT story here. Complete story available in this very long report from the RFK Memorial, one of the human rights groups that broke the story. (pdf) From the organization's press release on the topic:

Using documents obtained by the RFK Center through a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department, the
report exposes the U.S. government’s role in blocking the disbursal of
millions of dollars in loans that would have had life-saving
consequences for the Haitian people. The loans, which the
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) approved in 1998 for urgently
needed water and sanitation projects in Haiti, were derailed in 2001 by
politically-motivated, behind-the-scenes interventions on behalf of the
United States and other members of the international community.

A drought in Australia and rising oil prices because of competition from an emerging China are being blamed for the food riots in Haiti and increasing starvation in poor countries across the globe. Well, maybe, but it's hard to square this sudden inflation of the cost of staples with a looming economic collapse and a booming stock market (booming until a few weeks ago, at any rate, and even now doing pretty well all things considered). Prices should be coming down, not continuing to rise.

The first is that it’s mainly speculation — that investors, looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates, have piled into commodity futures, driving up prices. On this view, someday soon the bubble will burst and high resource prices will go the way of Pets.com.

The second view is that soaring resource prices do, in fact, have a basis in fundamentals — especially rapidly growing demand from newly meat-eating, car-driving Chinese — but that given time we’ll drill more wells, plant more acres, and increased supply will push prices right back down again.

The third view is that the era of cheap resources is over for good — that we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit.

Then he asks the question that the "peak oil" Cassandras have been asking about energy prices but enlarges it:

It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

One of the things it apparently would mean if it's true is that the corporations who put $$$Billions$$$ into genetically modified food and have been losing their shirts due to global resistance (nobody wants to risk what has come to be known to its detractors as "Frankenfood") suddenly have a financially exploitable situation on their hands: so many people are so hungry that they're willing to overlook the potential dangers of GMF.

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops.

In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky.

“We cannot afford it,” said a corn buyer at Kato Kagaku, a Japanese maker of corn starch and corn syrup.

***

Genetically modified crops contain genes from other organisms to make the plants resistance to insects, herbicides or disease. Opponents continue to worry that such crops have not been studied enough and that they might pose risks to health and the environment.

“I think it’s pretty clear that price and supply concerns have people thinking a little bit differently today,” said Steve Mercer, a spokesman for U.S. Wheat Associates, a federally supported cooperative that promotes American wheat abroad.

Yeah, funny how that works.

Now, I'm not quite enough of a conspiracy nut to suggest that ADM and other giant agribusinesses used the nervousness of commodities markets and the steep price of oil to engineer a hunger crisis just to recoup all the R&D money they've gone through and had all but given up on getting back, but I have to say the timing and the neatness of the supposed "accidental" convergence of the two are a mite, well, questionable.

Oui, c'est Haiti! TyPo never fails! And you won't believe how inexpensive it is to feed a child for a whole year in one of the poorest countries on the planet as it struggles to recover from devastating years of war:

For years, parents in central Haiti faced a terrible choice. They
could send their children to school with empty stomachs, in the hope
that they might gain the skills to someday escape poverty. Or they
could keep them at home to work in the family gardens, to help produce
much-needed food for right now.

Thanks to the dedicated efforts of Partners in Health's child
nutrition program, more than 17,000 children at 28 schools in central
Haiti receive piping hot lunches every day—free of charge. Local cooks
employed by the program prepare the nourishing meals from hundreds of
giant sacks of rice and beans, distributed regularly by PIH as part of
the expanding struggle to eradicate child malnutrition from Haiti's
impoverished Central Plateau.

The broad smiles of the children are mirrored by their teachers, who
know the tremendous impact this program has had on their schools. Now
that parents no longer have to choose between education or food for
their children, school attendance has increased significantly. And so
have the attention spans and classroom performance of the children once
they get to school.

"Before the lunch program started, many of my students would come to
school hungry or wouldn't come at all," recalls one teacher. "Since we
began giving daily meals, they hardly ever miss a day and their
academic performance has improved dramatically."

"The program is one of the cornerstones of our commitment to social
support in the Central Plateau," notes PIH's Food Assistance
Coordinator Elisabeth Berger. "Its strength is that it takes a
proactive community-based approach to preventing child malnutrition,
ensuring that children won't have to come into our clinics as patients."

Purchase of this Gift That Gives More™ ($50) provides an entire year's
worth of food for a hungry child in Haiti, where malnutrition among
children is the worst in the Western Hemisphere.

According to the corporate media, the new cabinet proposed by PM Jacques Edouard Alexis, is a success. I'm not sure what that means. From Reuters:

He named a cabinet that included members of at least five rival
political parties and seven people who served as ministers during
Preval's first presidency, from 1996 to 2001.

The Senate debated Alexis' program into the night but was
expected to approve both the plan and the ministers. Rejection would be
the equivalent of a no-confidence vote and Preval would have to choose
a new prime minister.

Preval's election in February was an
important step in Haiti's return to democracy as the Caribbean nation
of 8.5 million people -- the poorest in the Americas -- struggles to
shake off decades of dictatorship, military rule and political upheaval.

"return to democracy" We've heard that before. i'm not sure how someone prints that with a straight face.

In other news about democracy bringing, the UN peacekeepers are in shoot outs in Cite Soleil again. Again, I have no idea what that means except that people are dead. I'm waiting to read what HaitiAction.net says about it. Hopefully Kevin Pina will be covering the story.

There's Ayisyen. In French and opposed to Preval, which is interesting.

There's the excellent kiskeyAcity, written by Alice Eddie Backer, who also writes for Global Voices. It's in English with lots of insightful commentary and links. I found this list of recommendations for Preval there. It looks good to me, but as Alice said, I don't know anything about the site where it's posted.

Ayititoma, a blogger who returned to Haiti to "make a difference." Her first and only post so far is an open letter to Haiti inspired by the murder of Lucienne Estime, the elderly widow of Haiti's first black president. She may be friends with Estime's daughter, who also returned to Haiti to work. It's unclear.

I'm swamped today with Coalition for Voting Integrity work as well as family stuff but I thought I'd post quickly about a weekend conversation I had with a woman who immigrated here from Haiti about ten years ago. I ate dinner with her and took a few minutes to grill her on whether I was way off base about what I thought was happening in Haiti. I couldn't press her too much about personal information since I don't really know her too well and it was a social occasion, but I asked her opinion on a bunch of my conclusions. To my shock she said that as far as she knew, I had the story right.

Aristide was no saint. She was troubled by millions of dollars that disappeared on his watch. She was ambivalent about his right to return but if it comes between him coming back and more people dying, she's okay with his continued absence. She agrees that the class war in Haiti is ruinous and is being further entrenched and openly so by the West, who side with the moneyed elite. She is deeply suspicious of BushCo's intentions although clearly a fan of the United States. Her daughter was born here. She has huge hopes for Preval mostly because of his record from the last time he was President and because he's reaching out to everyone he can in the region now. She likes that he seems flexible. She thinks that if anyone can get Haiti on the right track, it's Preval. She worries about the poor in Haiti because despite their overwhelming numbers, they are vulnerable to the wealthy and to outside military action, which we've seen over the last four years.

If a foreign power invaded the US and sent the president packing in the night under threat of death, would the US be able to move without the exiled president being allowed to return to his country even if he would no longer be president?

After I posted my starry-eyed, can't-we-all-just-get-along evaluation of what's next for Haiti that did more to reveal that I don't have any idea of what's going on in Haiti than anything else, an email blast from Margueritte Laurent showed up in my mailbox. Laurent is an artist and activist. This is from her biography, which appears at her site:

She is founder of The Haitian Lawyers Leadership, a network of lawyers dedicated to institutionalizing the rule of law and protecting the civil and cultural rights of Haitians at home and abroad. She has written a judicial reform agenda for Haiti. Her most challenging and memorablework thus far has been as legal advisor, in 1994-1995, to Haitian President
Jean Bertrand Aristide in promoting the democratizing process in Haiti.
The "Red, Black & Moonlight" performance series is a musical memoir
based on that story and her life and work in the United States.

So she worked for Aristide in the mid-nineties. I've known that for a while so I wasn't surprised to see the call for Aristide's return show up in the email. It's a big part of quite a few of the emails from HLLN. This is the kind of question that makes outsiders like me want to throw up their hands and ask, Is Aristide that big a deal?

Still I think the emotions expressed in this email are real in Haiti, although I'm not sure the whole country pins as much importance on Aristide's return as Laurent does. I have to believe that most Haitians want a peaceful, economically just Haiti with full employment. If that means Aristide will never come home, they'd be okay with that. But the fact is, I don't know.

I'll start the email here and put the rest after the jump. It's long and rambles a bit but if you're interested in Haiti, give it a read. Laurent talks about Haitian history, Haitian identity, the coup that sent Aristide into exile, the UN occupation, Preval's inaugural address and what she thinks needs to happen to get to that peaceful, economically just Haiti. File it under "another county heard from" or "information you'll never get in the corporate media."

Hope and Humiliation: May 18, 2006 and the Inaugural of President Rene Preval by
Marguerite Laurent

Today, May 18, 2006 is Flag Day in Haiti. It's a
time to remember why the African general, general Jean Jacques Dessalines took
the tri-colored French flag, ripped out the white and threw it into the sea,
leaving our flag, blue, and the red. It's a time to remember why the emblem
engraved in the coat of arms of Haiti is "L'union Fait La Force" – “in unity
lies our strength”.

It's a time to remember that after 300 years of
European barbarity in Haiti – Haiti, the first place Africans where transported
as European captives for the "New World" - that on May 18, 1803, after beating
the armies of Great Britain, Spain, France and the embargo and arms of the US
white settlers, the Africans, who became "Haitian," in the land of the
Taino-Arawaks Amerindians had, with this great feat, even Spartacus couldn’t
achieved, liberated the sons and daughters of Africa, eviscerating the white
men's fatalistic idea that the child of a Black woman was lesser than that of
the white men.

Cold spaghetti is all the time I've had time to cook lately. And by cook I mean taking the plastic wrap off the pot before I put it on the table in front of the kids. I'm kidding. I feed my kids real food. I'm the one eating the cold spaghetti.

It's been a crowded month. Apparently every school event involving my children was scheduled to happen in May. For me, of course, there were the primaries to lose. You'll be surprised to find out that it can take the same amount of time to lose an election as it does to win one. Who knew? In the case of Casey, it took a lot of time avoiding the primary in order to win it, which he did masterfully. The avoiding that is.

With no legislation in place to mandate a voter-verified paper ballot and a proper audit of the election results, most of PA voted on unverifiable and unsecure voting machines. The reviews from the corporate media are in. Predictably, since no machine sprung to life and killed actual voters, the electronic systems were routinely describedin the corporate media as effective or even in once case "swell." The gaping security hole in Diebold's TSX, which was used in sixteen Pennsylvania counties was largely ignored. The failures of machines all over the state were written off as glitches. It fell to me, Cassandra that I am, to remind anyone who cared to read what I write over at the PhillyBurbs site that even if we can set the hundreds of "glitches" and stunning programming weaknesses aside, we really have no idea how the machines that did work performed because we haven't audited those results and we have no means to do so.

Democracy is on the march, people. Speaking of which, I wrote about Haiti for the American Street. Even though nobody thought to fly me down for Preval's inauguration, which happened on Sunday, I'm not holding any grudges. I'll keep trying to figure out what's going on down there.

The Haitian elections got a ton of well-deserved press but, with the election of Preval, a true reformer, the story of what comes next is going to be even bigger. After the nightmare coup and disastrous rule of Latortue, universally acknowledged as a puppet of the governments that sponsored the removal of Aristide, Haiti has a real shot at strong leadership from Renee Preval. He's had this job before so it will be hard for his enemies to cast him as inept should he displease them by refusing to rebuild Haiti on the already strained backs of the poor.

For my part, I'm absolutely fascinated to watch him navigate the very dangerous waters he's found himself in. And despite being a Cassandra, I'm enough of an idealist to think that he can find a way to get to that middle ground he so clearly seeks and maintain his ideals of social and economic justice. It would be a miracle if he can accomplish that but if there's anywhere due for a miracle, it's Haiti.

Bang for the Buck: Boosting the American Economy

Compassionate Conservatism in Action

Molly

"We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war."

Zinn

"[O]ur time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice."

Bono

"True religion will not let us fall asleep in the comfort of our freedom. Love thy neighbor is not a piece of advice, it's a command. ...

God, my friends, is with the poor and God is with us, if we are with them. This is not a burden, this is an adventure."

The Reverend Al Sharpton

Ray wasn't singing about what he knew, 'cause Ray had been blind since he was a child. He hadn't seen many purple mountains. He hadn't seen many fruited plains. He was singing about what he believed to be.

Mr. President, we love America, not because of all of us have seen the beauty all the time.

But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.

Marx

''With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent will produce eagerness, 50 percent positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime which it will not scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.''